Death Benefits
Part of a public panel, "Successful Aging and Thinking About Death" Village Library of Cooperstown, NY May 2014
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”--Kafka
My husband Sandy and I have taken to joking about the endless stream of letters we now receive from the American Association of Retired Persons begging us to join. He’s been getting them for years, but mine have just begun-- a flood of red and white envelopes with membership cards already made out in my name. “I’m not even close to retirement,” I tell the envelopes, dropping them into the recycling bin, “So stop teasing me with it!” But the other day I got a new one that said, in blaring script across its front, “Have you thought about Death Benefits?” I laughed out loud, then waggled the letter in Sandy’s face,
“Death benefits? What are those?” I crowed.
At first I meant that we don’t have much life insurance; and then in an instant I began to giggle, imagining a comic using this phrase ”Death Benefits” as material for some very dark stand up comedy about a month’s worth of free casseroles, flowers, and funeral fans. And then in the midst of all that mirth, I suddenly stopped and said,
“Oh!”
“What?” said Sandy.
And I replied--sort of blinking internally, not laughing anymore, the gears in my brain beginning to turn-- “But of course there ARE Death Benefits, aren’t there? I mean benefits to death.”
As a Buddhist, this wasn’t a new or surprising idea to me; it is at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching that coming to terms with death is the doorway to enlightenment. But I was struck with it anyway because I hadn’t thought of the play on words before--Death Benefits--and also because, though our culture has gotten better at thinking about the business part of death--the putting our affairs in order side of death, the life insurance and death benefits side of death--we haven’t gotten any better dealing with the messy truth of it: the body failing, the human hearts breaking, the legacy we leave behind by how we leave this world. And we haven’t wrestled with its finality and its ubiquity and its immediacy. We pretend death is going to happen to the other guy. Or if we admit that we are going to die, that it will happen sometime way off in the future–but not today, not this moment, not now. And even if we have spent some time thinking about death, and realizing that death is going to happen to us, and preparing for it as individuals, as a culture we haven’t done these things. We don’t like to think about it, we haven’t learned how to talk openly about it, and we haven’t taught our children to live well in the face of it. And it hasn’t even occurred to us that learning to live well in the face of death might possibly mean not just seeing it as something to accept, but perhaps as something to embrace as our teacher and even as our companion on life’s journey.
No. We have not done these things. In our culture, death is pretty much invisible, we don’t like to admit it happens, and when it does, like pooping or pornography, we do it in private with the door closed and we keep it out of the reach of our children. Our culture is youth obsessed, death-denying, and in a multi-billion dollar struggle to create our own immortality. But what might it mean to stop this craziness? To accept aging and mortality, to turn around and look Death straight in the eye? It seems the time is ripe to do this: According to the Stanford Center on Longevity, by next year, the number of people over 65 in the U.S. will be greater than the number of children under 15; and by the time our kids reach old age, living to 100 will be commonplace.
When my husband and I first went to India, I had a small taste of what dropping this denial might do for us. India requires a lot of one. It’s an intense place in so many ways--colors, smells, people, animals, sounds . . . and death. In a single day one might see a dead dog pulled to the side of the road; a dead pig with vultures already set upon it in a frenzy of feasting; and a human being, propped against a building, sick and dying, or already dead. People and animals live on the streets, so they die there as well. Varanasi (also known as Benaras or Kashi) India, where we lived for some time, is the seat of ancient Indian culture and learning, and it is also the place where Hindus believe liberation from the wheel of suffering is guaranteed: if you die in Varanasi, you will escape rebirth. Thus, people come to Varanasi to die. Daily funeral processions snake down through traffic to the burning ghats on the sacred river Ganges where the bodies are publicly cremated and the funeral pyres burn day and night. There the dead are placed on heaps of wood, just more logs for the flames. The city of Benares is filled with the smell of burning human flesh.
Unsurprisingly, given this fact, there is no denying death. Not for the inhabitant and not for the visitor. One must make a decision: Go crazy from trying to pretend death is not real, or acknowledge it, work with it, and let go to death. I “chose” the latter and to my surprise, it was a great relief. I had never realized how much mental and emotional energy denying death was costing me, how subliminally preoccupied with death I was! Once a lot of that mental energy was freed up and available to me, I found that I could move more deeply into living. (Many people have written about this since the time that Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his book, The Denial of Death–two months after he died– but his book remains one of the best explorations of the costs of denying death. I recommend it).
In India "the Trimurti" --the three main gods worshiped by Hindus–are Lord Brahma the Creator; Lord Vishnu the Sustainer; and Lord Shiva, the Lord of Destruction and Death. Interestingly, Lord Shiva, the Lord of Death, is revered as much as the other two gods. Together birth, continuance, and dissolution are one, a great trinity, representing the life of the cosmos, the three principles of creation. In my view, Hinduism acknowledges something profound: We need to stop fearing death and learn to respect it because we NEED death; it’s an essential part of the whole. We need it to complete the cycle of life: this is the breathing in and out of things, the sea tide coming and going, the seasons turning, the recycling of our linked creation. In Indian cosmology, Lord Shiva releases one from life’s suffering as much as he brings suffering into life. At some point, one can have too much of life and just want to lay one’s weary head upon the ground . . .
From the perspective of another Indian religion, Buddhism (5th Century BCE), death is also intimately bound to life. In Samsara--this world of physical phenomena--there is no up without down, no light without dark, no good without bad, and no life without death. There cannot be one without the other. They depend upon each other utterly; this is Dependent Origination. In fact, in Buddhism the very existence of this self that dies depends on all of you--I am wife because of husband, sister because of brothers, teacher because of students, speaker because of audience. Thus all things, our very selves, are linked, and bound, and dependent, one upon the other: The Liz and the not Liz; the “is” and the “is-not’; our Life and our Death in an endless dance. Also, from the Buddhist perspective, birth and death are happening all the time, moment by moment, a hundred thousand time a day: As Buddhist Dharma has it “death is the continually repeating dissolution of each momentary physical-mental combination.” In every moment, in every second "I" die and "I" am reborn, a new "I" taking over from the old one that is gone forever. So, from the Buddhist perspective, we spend a lifetime practicing death, we just don’t know it. That could sound a bit morbid, of course. What about birth and growth, the surge of sweet, green, ripening that comes before? What about life? Well, the secret is that if we allow ourselves to let go of an attachment to life as something that doesn't include its essential partner death, we will find that we are part of something much more beautiful, more peaceful, more interesting, and more sustaining. All of our wisdom traditions tell us the same thing: as the Saint Francis prayer goes, “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
So what do I know about death? Not much, really, but perhaps enough: Death frames our life, and there is Mystery on both sides; we are born out of Mystery and we die back into it, and we don’t know what’s on either side. That’s what gives life its sweetness, I think, its meaning: death. Death is something to work with, to wrestle with, to make sense of, and to make peace with. One might even say that the struggle to do so is the birthplace of everything we most value--art, philosophy, poetry, science, religion, dance, music, and loving compassion. Without its brief beauty, where would the rose get its sweetness, its poignancy, its perfection? Where would we get our own? Death is a lifelong companion. We live curled up against its skin, twinned with it, forever joined--our living self, and our death.
So, our lives are bracketed by Mystery--two hands cupping time. Death is the begging bowl we carry, and life is what falls in. How we arrange the contents in that bowl, what sense we make of it--what narrative, what story we tell ourselves about our life and death--seems to me to be vitally important. But in order to do this, we have to look at the bowl a while; we have to look at the silence that holds the sound, the mystery that holds the known, the death that holds our life. As every story-teller knows, a good story requires a beginning and a middle and an end. We all know the tragic curse of a life story without an ending: ghosts that can’t cross over; vampires doomed to an endless existence; and even in our modern day, life without death is seen as curse of tomorrows (the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, is a classic example). These are cautionary tales reminding us of the gift of death and curse that endless life might bring.
So let us not deny. We are ALL terminal, we are all going to die; let’s look at this life, and our death, and try to find the meaning there, the tasty morsels at the bottom of the begging bowl.
